Alien And Alone In His Own Country

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Irreverent humor, frustrated idealism and earnest compassion are blended with a keen sense of character, place and political reality in the auspicious ''English, August.''

The film provides a lighthearted frame for an incisive rendering of a gallery of memorable characters against the background of the problems of modern India. It was directed by Dev Benegal, who wrote the screenplay with Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose novel was its source.

The focus of ''English, August'' is Agastya Sen (Rahul Bose), known as August, the well-educated son of the Governor of Bengal who majored in English in college and now, at 24, has embarked on a career as a civil servant in a part of his country where he cannot speak the language. A product of big-city life in Calcutta, August is dispatched to Madna, a backwater notable for intense heat, high humidity, disease and a statue of Gandhi that stands only because it is propped up.

August's superior, Ravi Srivastava (Salim Shah), attends to his duties as the Collector of Madna in perfunctory fashion. For young, single men like August, in this tiny community there is no possibility of anything but solitary sex, although the police chief is willing to share his pornographic movies. Among the governed, rebellion is seething, fed by a can't-do attitude among civil servants that leaves some communities without such basic necessities as water.

August tries asceticism (long solitary runs), books, music. He tries alcohol, marijuana and more masturbation. Madna, where the walls of the Collector's office are adorned with plaques bearing the names of his predecessors far back into the days of the Raj, remains, embodying the struggle of its people to break free of the past and partake of the present.

In ''English, August,'' his first feature film, Mr. Benegal deftly manages the feat of using the scalpel of humor to lay bare a young man's painful but edifying immersion in an alien culture within his own land and to deliver potent sociological and political messages.

ENGLISH, AUGUST

Directed and edited by Dev Benegal; written (in English and Hindi, with English subtitles) by Upamanyu Chatterjee and Mr. Benegal; director of photography, Anoop Jotwani; music by D. Wood; produced by Anuradha Parikh. Shown today at 4 and tomorrow at 6 P.M. at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, Manhattan, as part of the New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is not rated.